Regularly published and awarded in America since the 1970s, Eloise Greenfield is little known in the UK. That’s about to change. In April Tiny Owl will be publishing Thinker: My Puppy Poet And Me. The African-American author’s poetry collection will be illustrated by Iranian artist Ehsan Abdollahi. The title is part of the publisher’s wider programme of promoting under-represented voices and cultures in literature.

Eloise Greenfield has written 47 books for children in a career spanning nearly 60 years. She is known for her focus on positive portrayals of black culture and family life and was recently awarded the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. This prestigious award celebrates an African American author or illustrator who has made a significant and lasting contribution to literature.

A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Boorn in 1997 and raised in East London, Amina Jama is a Somali-British writer and member of the Barbican Young Poets collective. She has had worked published by the Sula Collective, an online magazine ‘for and by people of colour’.

There are several examples of her spoken word poetry on YouTube, including this powerful piece performed for an adult audience.

‘The House At The End Of The Street’ is one of the best poems in the Rising Stars collection

One of the ironies of an anthology of poets known for their spoken word work is that it contains so many poems that do not rely on performance for their impact. This may be because the poets’ performed poetry is usually more adult in theme. Whatever the reason, ‘The House At The End Of The Street’, about a best friend moving home, is one such example of a poem that has full adequacy as printed words on a page.

Written in rhyming couplets it is lightly descriptive in a manner that belies the emotion behind it.

Leila was my best friend since Year Two.
For years we got each other through.

I was there when her dad left her mum,
I plaited her hair and stroked her heart until she was numb.

Now she was moving out from her house at the end of the street
and another kid would come into class and take her seat.

I also like the ambiguity at the start of the poem. Why are there ‘officers and firemen going in and out’? What of the ‘distant burnt smell’?

There is a welcome sense of humour in ‘Car Ride’, a poem about a father who always gets the words to songs wrong:

A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Jay Hulme is a young transgender performance poet from Leicester, now based in Bristol. Another SLAMbassadors 2015 winner, he has already self-published two solo collections and has been featured in various anthologies. He also publishes on Tumblr and has recently established a Patreon page, primarily to help him offer his services for free to disadvantaged schools, libraries, and charities.

This poem about being transgender is not included in Rising Stars.

Last year he was featured in a DAZE item on up-and-coming spoken word artists:

Hulme talks about a range of topics, from life in the Midlands to his first week experiences at university. Hulme’s poem I am a man is a personal address as a transgender man to the problems that transgender people come up against every day. Ranging from pronoun mix-ups to death threats, Hulme’s frank spoken word performance, which is both touching and educational, is refreshing. Hulme shows just how important spoken word is to the new generation of people using the genre to address personal issues and share them with a wider audience.

Hulme’s style is direct and uncomplicated. Young readers will not struggle to understand any of his poems. The first of his eight poems included in Rising Stars, titled ‘Community’ with a knowing irony, describes growing up in an anonymous neighbourhood that will be recognisable by many people living in the suburbs.

We were told somebody started
a Neighbourhood Watch,
but I never met anyone
I know for sure was a neighbour.
we were all just figures, behind net curtains.

In the winters I’d walk the dog round the block,
hood up, head down, letting the world pass me by.

This is a moment to mention that the book has three different illustrators; Riya Chowdhury, Eleanor Chuah and Joe Manners. The latter is Hulme’s illustrator and I love the way he has interpreted this opening poem.

Hulme is particularly good at beginning with a prosaic everyday sensations then building it into a poetic one using simple techniques such as repetition and word pattern. ‘I Thought I Was Small’ begins

I thought I was small
when I first went to London

and ends

When I didn’t notice the heart
built into my body.
When I didn’t notice the universe
held within my soul.
I thought I was small.

Manners’ illustration for this poem is another particularly good one.

‘New Words’ is rhythmic and rhyming in a very self-assured way, and ‘Sunset at Brean Down’ is a lyric of beautiful timelessness

We walked on the shoreline,
My old dog and me,
Our feet being rushed
By the rippling sea.

The whole poem is very well done.

Hulme’s contribution to the collection ends with the thought-provoking ‘The Border’, about a walk with the ghosts from the past.

I wished they’d teach me
what stands before me, what types of mystery lie ahead.
But they stay silent. I forgive the
secrets guarded by the dead.

This is again very fine. I love the enjambment in the final two lines.

A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Abigail Cook is a SLAMbassadors-winning performance poet from London, and currently a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

The opening poem in Abigail’s section of Rising Stars:

Some of Cook’s other spoken (and sung) work can be found on Soundcloud.

As that opening poem suggests (‘My body is the garden I grew up in’ … ‘My hair is the ocean’… ‘My shoulders are bird’s wings’) Cook’s poetry is rich in metaphor.

‘Storm of a Girl’ begins

I have two storms inside me
I call them my mother and father.

Whereas much young writing in this style can be overly abstract and lacking in concrete detail, Cook conjures up the experience of adolescence extremely vividly – especially those first times of being away from (but still close by) the family home, staying up late under starry skies.

In the second poem, ‘Brother’

One night
we lay on the driveway
and counted every star
in the sky
plucked them and placed them in our pockets
there to light the way for the darkness ahead

Again, on ‘Night-time in the garden’

We wash ourselves in raindrops
sleep covered in leaves,
count every star in the sky,
watch the world go by.

Cook’s final poem ‘Summer Day’ is her strongest, perfectly capturing that best of all coming-of-age sensations: a powerful sense of benign, innocently-equipped omnipotence.

The summer was long and hot.
We sat outside in our pyjamas
whilst the world ended.

…

We spoke as if the sun would never rise again.
We spoke with laughter dripping from our lips,
trying to be braver,
and decided we would save the world.
With sticks as our swords
and sharpened ends
we saved the day
again.

A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley, born in 1991, is a British-Ghanaian poet, writer and film-maker, living in London. She is a former Barbican Young Poet and has had worked commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts. Her debut pamphlet, Girl B, is part of the 2017 New-generation African Poets series.

She is the director of Mother Tongues, an intergenerational poetry, film and translation project.

Interviewed recently by Dandano, a community project aimed at analyzing, documenting and archiving African film and music, Bulley described the project’s procedure: “A poet asks her mother to write a translation of a poem, the mother agrees and does so. Then, the two are filmed at a studio in intimate conversation, followed by the mother reciting the translation, with the original poem recited by the daughter.”

She went on

The project was borne out of a need to connect with the language that I’ve heard around me since birth, yet cannot understand. In my case, that language is Ga, spoken by the people most historically based around Accra, in Ghana. I have a deep love for indigenous cultures, and languages are the entry point into these. I also have a feeling of disconnection and limitedness, knowing that I can only really speak English. The fact that lesser-spoken languages are rapidly declining in usage is one that makes me intensely sad. MOTHER TONGUES, for me, is one small and meaningful attempt to restore and reconnect what is at risk of being lost or neglected.

Central to Bulley’s section in Rising Stars is a powerful prose poem, ‘This Poem Is Not About Parakeets’. A young woman is on a bus. Two men are mouthing off about immigrants. Saying things like, “They take up all the housing” and “They’re scroungers”. She has seven stops to travel. In her mind, as a means of blanking out the anger and prejudice, she thinks of parakeets…

I want to tell the men how the parakeets got here. All they do is take our jobs. How they were brought here in the 60s for a film, and then escaped. They’re scroungers. I want to tell them how despite the bad weather they never lost their sings. Why are they so noisy? How none of April’s showers ever washed their colours off. They don’t even try to blend in.

Elsewhere Bulley shows her versatility as a poet. There is a clever villanelle about the cat Toby killing a bird, which begins

Toby killed the bird at first light,
left the hallway dashed with feathers:
a fraction of a pillow fight.

Before we woke up, after night,
and hoovered up the snowy weather,
Toby killed the bird at first light.

As a photographer who loves taking portraits of people with big curly hair, I especially enjoyed the ‘Afro Hair Haiku’ sequence…

I used to harm it,
force it down, flat and lifeless –
a ghost of itself.

Now I let it grow
the way it wants to grow:
confident again.

‘Strange Dusts’ is a poem about African sands being blown into European skies and falling as ‘pollution’

air is indiscriminate
and wind knows
no such thing
as nations

Posts about the other poets in the collection will follow shortly.Ruth Awolola

Ten years ago, I remember it being World Book Day. This was the highlight of my academic year for several reasons: the book fair came to the school; we didn’t have maths lessons; and we were encouraged to go into school dressed as our favourite book characters. My brother however, who preferred running to reading, was not as enthused about the event. Two years earlier, before I joined the school, he had chosen to go as Kipper from the Biff, Chip and Kipper series. He returned home feeling defeated that day as a teaching assistant had told him he didn’t look like Kipper because Kipper wasn’t black. Every year after this he wore his latest football kit to school and cited he was a character from a book about sport that I knew he had never read. I was angry at him for not putting in any effort, sure that if he had read enough he would have found a character that looked like him. It wasn’t until I was eight years old and, despite having spent all my free time reading, couldn’t think of a black character I liked enough to dress up as, that I realised my brother wasn’t the problem.

I still struggle to think of many books with black protagonists and I assumed this was because there weren’t enough black writers. This played a role in why I initially found it so hard to start identifying myself as a poet. So few of the writers I was being encouraged to read or that we studied in class looked like me and so I developed a complex that I could not be one. It wasn’t until I was welcomed to the poetry community that I saw how diverse it really was and I met poets from all around the world. I found poetry that addressed issues I related to and I started to connect to writing more than I ever had before. I couldn’t help thinking, why couldn’t I have found this sooner?https://mediadiversified.org/2017/11/03/how-i-became-a-poet-ruth-awolola/

Awolola’s younger bother is the subject of ‘Superpowers’, the second of her eight poems included in Rising Stars.

My littler brother loves superheroes.
He wants to change the world,
get the keys to the city and save the girl.

A couple of the poems ruminate about the vastness of space. In ‘Mainly About Aliens’

I’m looking up into the sky
And I’m thinking why is it so big?

An in ‘Love Letter To The Stars’

There are things I hate about space,
It’s far too big and unknown.
But it is my safe place,
I long to call it home.

In the biographical piece quoted from earlier Awolola confesses, “I was initially daunted about writing for a younger audience as I hadn’t really written to a brief before. The best advice I received, which applies to all writing, is to write about what concerns you. There’s no use trying to produce something that relates to people if it doesn’t relate to you. I had to remember that the person I was five years ago was still me, with similar interests and concerns.”

She has done this very well. The poems are accessible and simply worded, yet they speak of the big things that children, as they reach nine or ten years old, contemplate with such receptive minds. The longest poem – ‘On Forgetting That I am A Tree’ – is a fabulous work of empathetic imagination. Picture a teacher suggesting to his or her class, “I want you to write a poem in which you pretend you are a tree,” and receiving this in response!

Near the beginning it goes

A poem in which I fear I did not dig into the past,
Did not think about my roots,
Forgot what it meant to be planted.

A poem in which I realise they may try to cut me down,
That I must change with the seasons,
That I do it so well
It looks as if they are changing with me.

And ends

A poem in which I stop looking for it,
Because I am home.
I am habitat.
My branches are host and shelter.
I am life-giver and fruit-bearer.
Self-sufficient protection.

Five début poets from diverse backgrounds, all aged 26 and under, performed work from the new collection Rising Stars, New Voices in Poetry, to a crowded room of booksellers, librarians, poets, festival programmers, critics and friends at Gerry’s Kitchen, Theatre Royal Stratford East, London on 21st November.

The poetry anthology for 10-14 year olds is an exciting collaboration between Otter-Barry Books and Pop Up Projects, supported by Arts Council England’ Grant for the Arts programme. Illustrations in the book are by final year students from Birmingham City University’s illustration course.

Joelle Taylor, founder and Artistic Director of SLAMbassadors UK, mentored all the poets and was consultant for the book. She said: “Rising Stars is a unique addition to the young poetry canon, with an anthology that addresses the vast diversity of peoplewithin the UK. Written by some of the brightest emerging poets in the country, the book tackles everyday issues from Afrohair to impending divorce with a delicacy and empathy rarely found. Finally, here is poetry that readers can see theirfaces in.”

Janetta Otter-Barry, Publisher, Otter-Barry Books said: “ We are immensely proud to publish this ground-breaking poetrycollection for young readers.”

Dylan Calder, Director, Pop Up Projects added: “All children need to see themselves in the pages of the books they read. Whatever it is you discover in this eloquent collection, have no doubt that between these pages you’ll encounter some of the brightest lights in poetry today – alongside outstanding first-time illustrators. Truly, these are the stars to watch out for.”

National Poetry Day 2017 is a little earlier than usual, because the BBC and Hull City of Culture are collaborating with the charity on the celebration to ensure still more are involved closely in enjoying, discovering and sharing poetry, all year round.

This year’s theme is Freedom.
National Poetry Day is an annual celebration that inspires people throughout the UK to enjoy, discover and share poems. Everyone is invited to join in, whether by organising events, displays, competitions or by simply posting favourite lines of poetry on social media using #nationalpoetryday.

National Poetry Day was founded in 1994 by the charity Forward Arts Foundation, whose mission is to celebrate excellence in poetry and increase its audience. The Day enjoys the support of the BBC, Arts Council England, the Royal Mail and leading literary and cultural organisations, alongside booksellers, publishers, libraries and schools.

The winner of the CLiPPA 2017 is Kate Wakeling for Moon Juice. The announcement was made at the finale of the Poetry Show at the Olivier, National Theatre on 14 July 2017 which featured performances from talented young poets from the five winning shadowing schools and performances from Kate Wakeling and two other CLiPPA 2017 shortlisted poets, James Carter and Michaela Morgan. Booked by Kwame Alexander, published by Andersen Press, was highly commended.

The CLiPPA (Centre for Literacy in Primary Poetry Award) for a book of poetry for children was launched in 2003. This is the only award for published poetry for children, highlighting an important branch of children’s literature and ensuring that it receives proper recognition. The award is presented annually for a book of poetry published in the preceding year.

The CLiPPA 2017 Shortlistees were:

Booked by Kwame Alexander

Wonderland: Alice in Poetry Ed. Michaela Morgan

Moon Juice by Kate Wakeling, illus. Elina Braslina

Jelly Boots, Smelly Boots by Michael Rosen, illus. David Tazzyman

Zim Zam Zoom! by James Carter, illus. Nicola Colton

The Chair of the Judging panel was poet Rachel Rooney.

Rachel was joined by a range of poetry experts who share a passion for poetry and its place in children’s developing literacy.